On Friday 29 May 2026 at 11:36 UTC, a UDP reflection (NTP) targeted a electronics retail customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 19.3 Gbps and lasted 61 minutes. Traffic originated from 3546 autonomous systems in 103 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | UDP reflection (NTP) |
| Peak | 19.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 61 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.641 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.027% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.33% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 20 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.